Chinese Poetry: An Anthology of Major Modes and Genres

by Wai-lim Yip (Editor)

This is the first paperback edition of a classic anthology of Chinese poetry. Spanning two thousand years—from the Book of Songs (circa 600 B.C.) to the chü form of the Yuan Dynasty (1260–1368)—these 150 poems cover all major genres that students of Chinese poetry must learn.
Newly designed, the unique format of this volume will enhance its reputation as the definitive introduction to Chinese poetry, while its introductory essay on issues of Chinese aesthetics will continue to be an essential text on the problems of translating such works into English. Each poem is printed with the original Chinese characters in calligraphic form, coordinated with word-for-word annotations, and followed by an English translation. Correcting more than a century of distortion of the classical Chinese by translators unconcerned with the intricacies and aesthetics of the Chinese language, these masterful translations by Wai-lim Yip, a noted and honored translator and scholar, allow English readers to enter more easily into the dynamic of the original poems. Each section of the volume is introduced by a short essay on the mode or genre of poem about to be presented and is followed by a comprehensive bibliography.

Genres: Poetry, China, Nonfiction, Reference

376 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1976

About the author

Wai-lim Yip, also known as Yeh Wei-lien (Wade-Giles) and Ye Weilian (pinyin) (Chinese: 葉維廉) (born June 20, 1937), is a Chinese poet, translator, critic, editor, and professor of Chinese and comparative literature.

Yip was born in Guangdong province, China, and at the age of twelve moved to Hong Kong, where he started writing poetry and was active on the poetry scene. He graduated from National Taiwan University (BA, 1959) and went on to National Taiwan Normal University (MA, 1961), where he did a thesis on T.S. Eliot and translated "The Waste Land." In 1963 he went to the United States to attend the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, whose director, Paul Engle, went to Taipei to negotiate permission for Yip's wife Tzu-mei and their daughter to leave Taiwan;[3] he received an MFA in 1964. He then did graduate work at Princeton University, receiving a PhD in comparative literature in 1967. In the same year he joined the faculty of University of California, San Diego, with which he has been affiliated ever since. In 1970 he returned to National Taiwan University as a visiting professor of comparative literature. In 1980 he joined the Department of English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong as a visiting professor. Since then, he has visited mainland China many times, teaching comparative literature at Peking University and Tsinghua University.

Yip's poetic theory, relating modernist poetry to Taoist aesthetics, has been very influential in Taiwan.[4] In recent years he has been the object of considerable attention in China, with exhibitions of his archives and conferences devoted to his poetry, as well as publication of his Complete Works in nine volumes.

Reviews

[Joshua Loong · Rating 5 out of 5]

Must have anthology if you’re at all interested in Chinese poetry. The book shows hundreds of historical Chinese poems in three ways: 1) Once in its original traditional Chinese characters 2) Another in a strict, character-by-character direct translation 3) Finally as a regular English verse translation. After reading Weinberger’s Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei I’ve been fascinated by the ambiguous nature of Chinese poetry and the difficulty of translating it into English (of which poetry is much more explicit and straightforward). Chinese relies so much less on conjunctions, and so meaning is generated in a much more open, context-dependent fashion than in most European languages. It’s the type of stuff that so fascinated the early Modernist poets. And so seeing the three modes (Chinese characters, English words, English verse) all side-by-side-by-side was really illuminating. It was fun trying to piece together my own meaning from the characters themselves before moving to the verse.

[Zach Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

[Review in progress]

[Talbot Hook · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wang Wei,
Liu Zongyuan:
Excellent poets.